Tag Archives: responsibilities

Facebook and Trust

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…seem, increasingly, a contradiction in terms.

See this image, from The Sun via Fox News, below.

The girl pictured has a laryngeal cleft, a hole between her larynx and her esophagus, which means she can’t eat normally; food or drink can pass into her airway.  The tube through her nose passes down her esophagus, bypassing that hole; it’s the only way she can take sustenance.

The girl’s mother tried to post the image on Facebook, not to garner sympathy, but to raise general awareness of the hassles and hazards of laryngeal clefts, and to raise money for her daughter’s necessary surgery.

Facebook barred the image, for the reasons listed in the text to the right of the image.  The text is hard to read; the money rationalization is this: the image

contains shocking, sensational or excessively violent content.  This type of material creates an unexpected experience for users, and goes against our core value of fostering a positive global community.

Because a smiling little girl, albeit with a tube in her nose, is shocking, sensational, or excessively violent.  Because Facebook has such contempt for its users that it considers them such snowflakes that unexpected experiences—surprises—would excessively disturb them.  Because Facebook’s view of positivity overtly excludes attempts to bring those apparent snowflakes’ attention to an uncommon medical condition so that that attention might foster increased medical research into ways of alleviating or correcting such a condition.

The mother successfully appealed the bar, but questions remain: with this sort of ban being Facebook’s kneejerk, initial action, how can Facebook be taken seriously?  How can Facebook’s management be trusted?

In the Liberal Stock

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Neomi Rao is in one, now that she’s a nominee for the DC Circuit Court.  She’s currently serving as the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs Administer, which means she’s already been vetted by the Senate—bipartisanly.  The Senate already knows who she is and what her abilities and qualifications are.

Well, never mind.  It seems, according to BuzzFeed—you remember the purveyors of a Cohen false news story so dishonest that even Mueller had to go public with the BS flag—Rao “wrote inflammatory op-eds in college.”  The horror.

Here’s an example of that inflammatory writing:

It has always seemed self-evident to me that even if I drank a lot, I would still be responsible for my actions.  A man who rapes a drunk girl should be prosecuted. At the same time, a good way to avoid a potential date rape is to stay reasonably sober.

Victim blaming?  Rational people wouldn’t think so, but….

The Progressive-Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee actually are taking Buzzfeed seriously.  The idiocy.

As The Wall Street Journal put it in their editorial at the first link above, none of that

is relevant to how she might rule as a 45-year-old judge with adult life experience.

The WSJ misunderstands, though.  Rao’s not the life experience of a wise Latina, so it’s irrelevant.  The intervening years don’t exist.

And that’s a tool wielded by those Progressive-Democrats and their NLMSM arm in their efforts to smear another conservative jurist.

Pseudo-Conservatives also Lie

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Here’s Charlie Kirk, founder and CEO of Turning Point USA, which pretends to advocate for young conservatives. The op-ed at the link is headlined

I judged the Covington kids too quickly—Here’s what I missed

It’s a missive in which he acknowledged he erred in jumping on the bandwagon and smearing those children as soon as he could, along with the rest of the Liberal class, on the basis of an initial, brief, carefully edited video (my characterization of the video; he thought differently about it). Here’s how Kirk described that careful edit.

It’s not that it had been taken out of context. It’s not that the situation was more complicated than we originally thought. It’s that there wasn’t anything there in the first place. There wasn’t now, and never had been, any evidence of the high school students doing anything untoward.

It’s not a matter of the video taken out of context; it’s that the video had undergone that careful editing to fit a preconceived narrative—that anyone wearing a Trump-supporting bit of clothing was evil, that anyone from the Left confronting such a person must be right, that blacks also involved must be innocent of any wrong-doing.

Aside from that little bit, here’s what Kirk missed.

This wasn’t a case of the press lying. Not this time. I made the same judgment that they did and I wasn’t lying. This wasn’t one of the media’s usual, deliberate distortions of facts or vitriolic attacks.

Yes, this was a case of the press lying.  This was a textbook, blatant case of the media’s deliberate distortion of the facts.  The lie—not a mistake in judgment—was made clear by the full 1¾ hour video that gave the full story, a video that was available very quickly after the event.  This was a video that would have been available if the press and the rest of the Left, and pseudo-conservatives, had been willing to tarry a bit and get actual facts instead of hastening to see who could be first with the smear.  And you lied, too, with your jumping onto the smear wagon.  The lie continues to be made clear by the press’ continued attacks on those children even now that the facts are out.

It absolutely was one of the press’ most vitriolic attacks—they called for the brutal (woodchippers) murders of these children.

Here’s the other thing Kirk missed.  Nowhere in his 500-word piece purporting to explain his error is there a single minim of an apology.  Kirk doesn’t even have the grace to apologize for his monstrous error.  Or he still doesn’t understand what he’s done.

Talk and Sovereignty

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French President Emmanuel Macron has embarked on a “debating tour” of France in response to the uproar surrounding his gas tax increases, decision to impose from the center a “carbon free” economy on France, and the yellow vest demonstrations against first the tax increases and subsequently in broader opposition to that overweening centrality of governance.

And Macron laid bare his basic misunderstanding of his own political environment and of the nature of French sovereignty.  He’s already met with 600 mayors in Normandy, and there he laid out his basic tenets.

Macron said he was there to hear the concerns of the French and promised that the questions raised by the citizens would be given consideration.

Given consideration.  But no commitment actually to answer those questions satisfactorily to “the citizens.”  And this:

We won’t agree on everything, that’s normal, that’s democracy. But at least we’ll show we are a people who are not afraid to talk, exchange, and debate[.]

Talk, exchange, and debate.  Chit-chat, not action.  We’ll put on this show, though.

And who is this “we” that won’t agree on everything?  Disagreement among the citizens is, indeed, the stuff and core of democracy.  But government?  Government has nothing with which to agree or disagree; that’s a non sequitur.  Government has only to obey the instructions of its employers, those citizens.

Or does the French government (not only Macron, and not only the present administration), the head of a legal system one of whose basic tenets is that the burden is on a government-accused man to prove his innocence rather than on the government to prove his guilt, conceive that the people work for the government and not the other way around?

Not even Rousseau went that far.

Bigotry and the Left

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Nicole Wallace, of MSNBC, says there isn’t any on the Left.  She insists, regarding Congressman Steve King’s (R, IA) remarks, there is no analogue on the Left.

…this does not have a parallel on the left. It doesn’t. There isn’t. There isn’t a strain of racism on the left.

Never mind that the identity politics of the Left, especially with the segregationist bent inherent in it, is fundamentally racist.

Never mind the overt racism of the Left’s heroine Tamika Mallory and her praise of the anti-Semitic bigot Louis Farrakhan.

Never mind the Left’s routine labeling conservative Blacks as Uncle Toms.

Never mind the Left’s routine vilification of conservative women as voting the way their husbands tell them to, or of being worthy targets of rape.

Never mind the Left’s labeling any who disagree with them irredeemably deplorable.

Never mind the Left’s slur of Tea Partiers as tea baggers.

No, none of that is racist, or sexist, or anti-Semitic, or general, casual bigotry.